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Note
on Genesis at Up Marden
Perhaps
the most formidable poem I’ve ever written. It might also be one of my
best. It was composed after an afternoon’s walking around, sitting in,
scribbling about, the barren little church in the village of Up Marden
in Hampshire. Iambic, as you can see, and stanzas of the form:
5a 5b 4a 5b numbers:
no. of iambic feet per line
3c
4A
letters: rhyme scheme
4d 5c
5d
A-a: consonantal assonance
It’s
worked-at, mannered. Clearly mine in elaborateness, in its worrying at
metaphysics. As to the latter, the conclusions are not the ones I
reached later but there’s a start. Let’s follow the argument.
Up
Marden church stands lonely amidst its graves. In some way yet to be
explained, the church building represents a ‘charged and empty Will’.
I liked what I’d read about Schopenhauer’s universal Will, to him
the basis of reality. It was what ‘breathed fire into the equations’,
to use a recent poeticism of Hawking’s.
Within
the church one encounters the chilly ‘origin of air’. This origin of
things is not self-aware. Its hallmarks are frugality, poverty. In these
pews one can savour the absence of mind and love. In this
deserted Christian church one savours (or I did) a distinctly
non-Christian godhead.
Yet
devout Christians must have prayed here over the centuries. Why they did
so is peculiar, unless the primeval Nothing held an attractive
fascination even for the naïve souls of cowherds and retired admirals.
What the Nothing might have intimated, perhaps, was a ‘proto-reason’,
that which shapes the laws of the universe as our words shape our
understanding of them. Perhaps existence is not a category one can
evoke. No matter. ‘Proto-reason’, even if not conscious, and even if
not ‘existent’ in any way we can understand, was able to ‘plan’
our physical existence, our planet and our pain. Non-conscious planning
on this level could do no other than it had to do. Einstein, who wasn’t
always right about God, wondered whether the Creator was free to act
otherwise than he did. Nature is forced, by than its own condition, to
act as it does.
The
clog: the clogging-up. Of:
by. Bright share: ploughshare. Gravel (v): 1 Choke or
block (up) with gravel. 2 fig. Nonplus, perplex,
puzzle. This bit:
The clog of the bright share
gravels the Will
says
that although the Will, as in Thomas Hardy, is unaware of our suffering,
desires and actions, nevertheless our toil thwarts it, perhaps runs
counter to its own ‘desire’ for extinction. Our being flaunts our
is-ness in the face of the non-being within whose womb we exist. Not
just we but the universe itself is a mistake that had to happen. Only in
paradox can we begin to understand. This is beginning to sound like
Woody Allen.
The
muscles and nerves of physical creation, cruel and lacerating to
themselves, painful to sentience—every action, even inaction, brings
suffering—all creation struggles with the unempty ‘nothing-ness’
of the Universal Will and brings about change and beauty, ‘ever-changing
glamour’. This struggle also produces moods of joy in the human
breast, in ‘the tiny soul’. At my most rococo:
Puce
quarrels of wood, glissando scarp, fat farms,
beget in the tiny soul moods less obtuse
—moods
less obtuse, less stupid, than the moods of God/Nature. Itinerant
priests can do nothing for our ‘tiny soul’, which has its own ways
of coping with the ignorance and hostility of the numinous. Not that
many itinerant priests are to be found in country churches these days,
even to do the dusting.
The
four crooked candelabra once held candles which cast some light on the
emptiness. When congregations did meet they got some whiff of what God
was about:
This is the very first place… .
This is where life starts...,
… different from us,
with
its own laws. At their core
there is the Will to matter, the Will to wake
itself
and
I suppose this can only mean that, as the Will breathed fire into the
equations, it could not avoid inventing existence, matter, life, us. I
seemed to think then that our kind of consciousness was bound to evolve.
I don’t now see why it should. So I’ve moved at least that far from
where stood I thirty-five years ago. My own beliefs, the early or late,
and for what they are worth, will prove congenial if they move you back
in memory or forward in hope along similar paths. They might look worthy
even if wrong-headed, if they enunciate a view you don’t hold but help
give your thoughts a new savour and stability. I can enjoy Herbert and
Hopkins without being Christian, Juvenal and Martial without necessarily
being cynical.
The
Up Marden church is the place to go when one is in the mood to ‘switch
synapses in the mind’ and dwell on first and last things. It is a
place to assess, in terms of ourselves, never mind what the experts say,
how the universe is coming along (‘gaug[ing] the fare of flame and
mire’). It is the place to judge how far life has come. ‘Life’ is
defined in a broader sense than usual as mere material ingredients; we’re
made of star dust, etc. ‘Life’ must have started ‘empty-handed,
blind, / different from us, a snake / of rhythmic spaces, unaware’. A
premonition of string theory?
The
Universal Will was bound to produce radiation and matter, though its
condition was and always will be a simple thing, ‘creep-ing ... ,
pigheaded, poor’.
In
the cemetery, the bones breed worm-eaten holes, ‘vermi-culated caves’.
Inside the church there are dead honesty leaves and an Armistice poppy.
All time is eternally present, or something like that, says relativity.
Death’s nothingness is equated with unmoving time, the background
against which the flux of events happens.
Perhaps
too much exposition takes one too far from how the poetry really works.
Difficulty doesn’t mean depth but at times it’s unavoidable. Here is
my paraphrase of the last verse:
The
air in this church is like a barren something from which life started.
It is also like death, like what is not alive in any sense. In a way,
you and I have died already. The burying of our bones is behind us.
Being dead is being unaware. If our senses were not impinged upon, we
couldn’t be called alive. ‘You only are aware by being seen’
stretches the idea further, for ‘seen’ has to carry a lot of weight
if it’s supposed to mean ‘being registered as present’, i.e. a
tree against which we might lean would ‘see’ us by returning the
pressure. Motor reflexes register the world in the same way.
‘Time
is the soul you die to find’: time, death, the universal soul, the
inexpressible noumenon, are the whole of the finite universe and more.
It’s what I’ve come to call just Nature. We die from one part into
another, though our aware part disappears.
‘And
you have died already’: this suggests reincarnation. I seemed to have
believed in the most encouraging kind, where we come back as other
people. Or perhaps I just meant that the human race continues and
persons like us have been here before. That feels more like it. The
sloping hillside (‘[a-]thwart green / of downs’) is where we once
lived as other persons (‘where your doubt / took root and voyages were
planned’). This reincarnation is not a carrying-over of an
individuated soul.
The
last three lines encourage the church-goer to speak this ‘truth’
aloud, so that the dead may hear. The dead stone cannot say it. Life
speaks for the unspeaking. The echo that comes back in the tunnel of
this lowly church can be taken for the applause of ancestral ghosts: our
life is theirs continued, so the biocentric mind imagines.
Alan
Marshfield
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